Children and Digital Media: Online, On Site, On the Go

Charting the relations between children and digital media immediately invites a bottom-up perspective on media, a perspective that focuses on the multiple ways in which children take up and appropriate digital media, be they audiences of media produced by adult professionals or content creators themselves. But one need not venture far in that direction to realize that this perspective is intimately bound up with a top-down perspective on these relations, a perspective that focuses on the ways in which adults debate and intervene in children’s media uses. This dual perspective is important to keep in mind simply because it serves as a useful reminder that children’s media uses are a set of contextualized socio-cultural practices that must be analysed and understood in relation to a grander canvas of modern childhood and adulthood.